Craft Beer Articles

On a warm February night 20 years ago, I found myself at an establishment in west Houston drinking beers with my boss and several top executives from Heineken. I was a wide-eyed 25-year-old greenhorn—a middling sales guy at a large beer distributorship—and I remember just being honored that I was invited to tag along with such... View Article

Headlines (including in this magazine) spoke of a Russian company purchasing the iconic American Pabst Brewing Co. when Eugene Kashper bought the brewery in 2014. While born in the Soviet Union, Kashper and his family immigrated to the U.S. as political refugees when he was 6 years old, and he later became an American citizen.... View Article

Beer is big business in Bend, OR. Its behemoth, Deschutes Brewery, is where Paul Arney worked his way up to assistant brewmaster before quitting in 2011 to launch his passion project, dubbed the Ale Apothecary. Compared with Deschutes’ 335,000 barrels produced in 2014, Ale Apothecary sold just 75 barrels’ worth of beer last year. However small... View Article

Brewing Porters and Stouts (Skyhorse Publishing, Paperback, $16.95, 224 pp) is a love story. But not for the romantic or faint of heart. It is a rigorous and passionate investigation into the life of porters and stouts. Foster is the perfect person for this subject. He combines a scientist’s rigor for data with a beer lover’s passion... View Article

There comes a point in most homebrewers’ lives when they just want to step out from under the elementary brewing techniques. Perhaps this means moving from extract to all-grain. The change in processes seems relatively straightforward, but the results fail to meet expectations. Maybe they want to nail the perfect IPA or re-create something encountered... View Article

More than a half-dozen years ago, Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson paused in the middle of a conversation about the relationship between agriculture and beer and nodded toward Eric Toft, a Wyoming native who has brewed beer in Bavaria for more than 20 years. He said he wished he could be “as connected as [Toft]... View Article

Mead has a mixed reputation. On the one hand, the honey wine is often thought of as an excessively sweet drink, and on the other hand we have manly Vikings quaffing “horns” of the beverage in their mead halls. The beverage slipped away possibly because of the high cost of honey compared with grapes and... View Article

When the two deans of United Kingdom beer journalism pen a survey of the new world of British beer, get ready to be frustrated. If you don’t live in the British Isles, you are going to hate reading the wonderful descriptions of beers you won’t be able to buy. However, you will feel the excitement... View Article